Thursday, 8 May 2014

Flashcards

Learning to read notes on the staff is hard work for many students.There are so many lines and spaces, and
they’re so close together.And it would
be so much easier if the notes were in the same places in each clef.But they’re not.Our system of music notation may not be the
easiest to learn, but it’s what we’re stuck with.

In the springtime, I always do a big flashcard push with my
students.Each child has flashcards that
they are supposed to review daily, testing themselves by trying to name the
note on the flashcard, and then checking the back of the card to see if they
are correct. In class each week, I challenge them with “60 Second Club”; simply,
each child has to see how many notes they can name in 60 seconds.I have them keep track of their scores, and
encourage them to try to improve every week.Almost always, they love this challenge and are proud to be able to tell me how many notes they can name.

Of course, just being able to name the notes is not all that
is required for good sight-reading.But as a teacher, I know that this approach
is effective in helping people improve their note-naming.My students are generally very quick at
naming notes, and I see a related improvement in their sight-reading abilities.

As a scientist, I wonder what the research is about
flashcards – why do they work and what is the best way to use them?Here’s what I found out.

Flashcards work because they are a method of testing
yourself.Just studying information,
reading it over, whether silently or out loud, does not promote learning as effectively as a test.Tests work well to promote
learning because you have to try to recall the information.Say you look at the
following note:

and name it correctly
as middle C. This reinforces the link between the place on the staff and
the name of the note.But what if you
don’t know the name? Does making an
error on a test promote learning of the correct answer?Studies show that it does.In fact, making an error (like naming a note
incorrectly) primes the brain to learn better immediately afterwards, even if
the new information is completely unrelated to the error.

Here’s another interesting finding about flashcards:you shouldn’t remove cards that you can
answer correctly.That doesn’t seem to
make sense – we naturally think that taking out the cards you know allows you
more study time on the cards you don’t know.But research has shown that this is not the best way.A study by Nate Kornell and Robert Bjork
showed that dropping flashcards once the material on that card was deemed to be
learned led to worse performance on a test, whether the test happened right
after studying or a week later.

The researchers concluded that there were two reasons that
dropping flashcards was ineffective.The
first is that the dropping of flashcards relies on students’ judgement of
whether an item is really well-learned, and requires a decision about how
well-learned something needs to be before it is dropped.Students don’t usually decide to overlearn
something even though there are proven benefits to overlearning.In other words, people drop flashcards too
soon.Just because you can name a note
right now doesn’t mean that you’ll remember it tomorrow.If you keep practicing naming it, that will help
you remember it better in the future.The second reason that keeping well-learned flashcards in the rotation
is best is that it helps to space out our learning. There is a whole field of research looking at
the Spacing Effect, but the main point is that trying to learn something all in a big block doesn’t work as well as when we take little breaks.In the case of flashcards, the flashcards
that are already well-learned act as spacers between the flashcards that we
are still learning.

I will confess that I’ve often told my students to drop
flashcards once they were well-learned, especially once they get into ledger
line notes."Just do the hard ones, over
and over", I’d tell them.But no
more.Practice the whole stack, that’s
the new way.And I expect they’ll learn
their notes even better.

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About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.